1. Field
Embodiments relate to electronic discovery of documents subject to a litigation hold, and particularly to efficiently identifying a set of documents relevant to a litigation.
2. Related Art
During or in anticipation of a litigation, parties to a litigation may be required to preserve and eventually produce documents in their possession that relate to the litigation. Documents to be preserved are known as being subject to a litigation hold. Documents may exist in electronic form in computer systems or electronic storage devices. One element of electronic discovery (e-discovery) involves obtaining a thorough set of relevant documents from those computer systems and electronic storage devices. When there are a large number of documents contained in one or more computer systems, the e-discovery process can be very cumbersome. Compliance with a litigation hold requires a thorough search of the computer systems and electronic storage devices. However, at least for reasons of privacy and confidentiality, parties want to avoid producing documents that are not relevant to the litigation. Therefore, a final determination of a document's relevance to the litigation is usually made by a manual review process. The expense of this process is related to the number of documents reviewed.
To reduce the expense of e-discovery, computer software may be used to automatically search for and retrieve relevant documents. Typically, the software will search for emails or documents containing selected keywords or names of individuals related to the litigation. The names and keywords used in the search are identified by the parties or people associated with the case. However, the results of such searches may include many documents that are not relevant to the litigation or may exclude many documents that are relevant to the litigation.